After the Civil War, the United States entered a significant period of transformation known as Reconstruction, which lasted from 1863 to 1877. During this time, the United States grappled with how to integrate millions of newly emancipated African Americans. Many beneficial things came out of Reconstruction, including the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery, the 14th Amendment that granted birthright citizenship, and the 15th Amendment that granted Black male suffrage by prohibiting states from denying the right to vote based on race, color, or previous enslavement. 

Unfortunately, many of the advantages during Reconstruction were repealed, resulting in the creation of sharecropping and the crop lien system – both contributing perpetual debt and a severe lack of economic independence for African Americans–the establishment of Black Codes, the terrorist white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan, and a overall lack of federal government involvement to enforce the Reconstruction amendments or to prevent the extra legal violence committed by white American against African Americans or seek justice after violence has been committed. By 1877, Jim Crow Laws, named after a minstrel show character, enforced racial segregation in public facilities, schools, housing, jobs, and continued to deny many of the rights given to African Americans during Reconstruction. Anyone who defied Jim Crow laws risked fines, arrests, violence, and even death. Jim Crow laws influenced the entire nation and were not limited to the Southern states. For instance, Jim Crow laws affected many of the founding Black families in Fort Collins, Colorado. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, multiple Black families in Fort Collins faced the challenges of Jim Crow, which included a lack of mobility, limited job opportunities, segregated housing, and an overall lack of community in a white centric town. Each family or individual faced these challenges head-on and continued to live their lives despite the circumstances. 

Due to segregation and travel exclusions, mobility was highly restricted for African Americans. Buses, streetcars, and railway compartments were all segregated. In written law or societal rules, black travelers were forced out of white compartments on various travel vehicles regardless of payment or status. White only businesses, including hotels, gas stations, restaurants, leisure sites, and more, refused service to African Americans. Travel discrimination became impossible to avoid even for those considered the Black elite such as Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King, Jr., or W.E.B. Dubois were all familiar with travel discrimination. Despite these restrictions, travel was still essential for African Americans. They may travel for employment, to attend school, to report for or return home from military service, to visit relatives, to tend to the sick and bury the dead, or to travel for fun and leisure. To navigate these segregated and dangerous spaces, an annual guidebook for African American roadtrippers was founded and published by New York City mailman Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1967. The Negro Motorist Green Book, or Green Book for short, was a guide for Black travelers that identified services and places friendly to African American travelers. It provided information on safe lodgings, businesses, and gas stations that would serve Black travelers along the road. Many Black families would also house Black travelers throughout the Jim Crow period. This was evident in early twentieth-century Fort Collins, Colorado. The home of an African American family, the Birdwhistles’, was not an official Green Book site but was known to house and accommodate Black travelers overnight. Whether directly named in Green Books or disseminated by word of mouth, the Black community came together to ensure safe travel across the segregated United States.

Another limitation of Jim Crow was the limitation on job opportunities. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the United States established economic and political systems that pushed capitalists and workers far apart, creating a large wealth gap. Many formerly enslaved Black workers who lacked education and finances were pushed into agricultural work and were forced to be sharecroppers or a part of a crop lien system, which became a perpetual cycle of being in debt to their employers who were often their former enslavers. This became a form of indentured servitude or those imprisoned to be least out to companies as convict laborers. In the North, African Americans could work in factories, as domestic servants, in unwanted low-paying jobs, or various trades for the few skilled workers. This was little improvement compared to the South due to Northern white Elites becoming the most powerful in the world through the further exploitation of African American workers. These limitations were prevalent for Black residents in Fort Collins, like Georgiana Coff, who worked for the family who had formerly enslaved her as a domestic servant, or for Charley Clay who worked as a “scavenger,” removing disposed items and trash off of public streets. Job opportunities were extremely limited, and African Americans were forced to work in unskilled and low-paying jobs that continued to exploit them.

Similarly, the Black families in Fort Collins who were limited in job opportunities were also limited in housing options. During Jim Crow, entire neighborhoods were segregated. Black families such as the Lyle family, the Thomas family, and Hicks family lived on the same streets and neighborhoods. Part of the reason these Black families and others lived near each other was due to redlining. This was a practice between the 1930s and 1960s, where African Americans were restricted from buying homes where predominantly white families lived. Areas redlined were often undesirable, locations of hazardous conditions, and perpetuated the wealth disparity between African Americans and white Americans. While these segregated living spaces were undesirable, the Black families that lived near each other were able to form strong community connections with one another. These connections were crucial so that the Black community could come together in a place where they belonged, could support each other, and have social connections. 

The Black church was an integral place of connection for the Black community. It was a place of protection, practicality, activism, and spirituality. The Black church became a location where African Americans could gather for educational purposes, to arrange mutual aid groups or form political organizations. In Fort Collins, there were very few public spaces that allowed the Black community to come together. Therefore, like many other Black communities, the Clay family created their own spaces and opened their home as Zion Baptist Church congregation and a meeting place for other important social gatherings. Unfortunately, the Black church has been a target of racialized violence because it operated as an independent institution outside white control. White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan would burn Black churches down. With the threat of violence, Black churches or other community spaces were at times limited and thus was a compelling factor for Black families to depart to cities that had more community spaces like the black church where they could come together socially and for support. Many of the funding Black families of Fort Collins left for this very reason. The lack of Black community spaces and the limited number of Black folks in the city were reasons to move to places that better suited their needs.